More than 250 international faculty and staff will gather in Chicago Oct. 30-31 for the “Global Learning Conference: Transcending Boundaries through COIL.” (DePaul University/Jamie Moncrief)CHICAGO — Only a small percentage of U.S. college students
will study abroad, but many will enter fields that require intercultural
competence. This fall, DePaul University will host a conference for faculty and
staff who use collaborative online international learning (COIL) to bring global
experiences into college classrooms.

“In a time when the political narrative is often hostile and
closed, this model can open students to other cultures and ways of learning,”
said GianMario Besana, associate provost for global engagement and online
learning at DePaul. “COIL pedagogy and technology help faculty collaborate with
colleagues at institutions in other parts of the world, and together they
create transformational experiences where students connect and learn,” said
Besana.

Several DePaul faculty are presenting at the Oct. 30-31 conference
and can discuss how they’ve used this pedagogy in their classrooms. Experts
include:

Nick Thomas, Assistant
Professor, School of Hospitality Leadership, Driehaus College of Business. Nick
Thomas teaches hospitality and tourism courses at DePaul. In 2017 he designed
and implemented a 110-student global learning experience with colleague Yuan
“Kate” Liu at the Shandong College of Tourism and Hospitality in Jinan, China.
Their online course focused on technology trends within the hospitality
industry. Thomas earlier connected with Liu when she completed a fellowship at
DePaul to learn about approaches to hospitality education. During their four-week
exchange, Thomas and Liu used recorded and synchronous lectures to teach while
students used tools including the Chinese messaging service WeChat to connect and
to discuss their project. The 13-hour time difference was a barrier for
students at first, said Thomas, but soon they were chatting at all hours. “When
one student was going to bed, one student was waking up. They learned that’s
the nature of the global economy,” said Thomas, who also directs the J. Willard
and Alice S. Marriott Foundation Center for Student Development and Engagement
at DePaul. Thomas can be reached at nthoma15@depaul.edu
or 312-362-6539.

Robert Steel, Associate
Professor, School of Cinematic Arts, College of Computing and Digital Media.
As a composer and sound designer, Robert Steel has worked on many film and TV
projects where “everything was done virtually” by communicating online and
sending large files back and forth. Steel wanted his film sound and scoring
students to understand this component of the industry. “I realized our students
need to have this virtual, international experience in cinema, because they’ll
be doing it in the real world,” he said. Steel will present on a collaborative
sound design course he conducted with Kenny McAlpine at Abertay University in
Scotland. Both universities are committed to increasing participation from
first-generation college students from lower income brackets who often do not
have the resources to study abroad. The two will discuss “how to embed a sense
of genuine cultural exchange when students are remote and enmeshed in their
local culture.” For instance, Steel and McAlpine encouraged their students to “blow
apart” stereotypes using soundscapes: Students in Scotland imagined how Chicago
might sound, and vice versa. Steel can be reached at rsteel@cdm.depaul.edu or 312-362-5819.

John Shanahan,
Associate Professor of English, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. John Shanahan
has been teaching the history of books for more than a decade, and he used an
online exchange with faculty and students in China to widen student
perspectives and his own. “Too often, students get only a Eurocentric story of
mechanical printing, but that’s not the whole story,” said Shanahan. The
earliest extant printed books are from East Asia, said Shanahan. He teamed up
with Baihua Wang, a faculty member at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. For
one project, DePaul graduate students studied how Emily Dickinson’s poems
changed over time – from Dickinson's handwriting on loose sheets of paper to
the first printed editions in the 1890s, up to their presentation today online.
The class at Fudan identified Dickinson poems with special interest to them as
translators from English to Chinese. Students in Chicago connected with peers
in Shanghai on the WeChat app for shared reading assignments and exchanges of
critical insight, culminating in live and recorded presentations at the end of
the quarter using the Zoom videoconferencing platform. Shanahan will repeat the
class in the winter of 2018 and examine medieval and early modern books from
DePaul Library's Special Collections and Archives. He can discuss how student
study links across time zones can have a positive outcome for students and
faculty. Shanahan can be reached at jshanah1@depaul.edu or 773-325-7309.

About the conference
More than 250 international faculty and staff will gather in Chicago Oct.
30-31 for the “Global Learning Conference: Transcending Boundaries through
COIL.” DePaul is co-hosting the event with State University of New York COIL
Center, which has hosted these types of conferences for more than a decade. Keynote
speakers include Mohamed Abdel-Kader, executive director of the Stevens Initiative
at the Aspen Institute; Daniel Obst, president and CEO of AFS; and Denise Lewin
Lloyd, associate professor of management at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. Find more information on the conference at http://globallearningconference.org.

DePaul has its own collaborative online international
learning initiative, the Global Learning Experience, which has helped more than
100 faculty through workshops and direct support. For more information visit http://go.depaul.edu/gle.